THE FIRST IDEA: HOW SYMBOLS, LANGUAGE AND INTELLIGENCE EVOLVED FROM OUR PRIMATE ANCESTORS TO MODERN HUMANS Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker 2004. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press Price UK £14.99, US $25.00 ISBN 0-7382-0680-6

Abstract

The attempt to define and perhaps understand what it is to be human within a broadly scientific perspective is less than 150 years old. For the anthropologist as for the archaeologist, the annus mirabilis was 1859, when the ‘Antiquity of Man’ was definitely recognized and Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published. The former, by recognizing the vast antiquity of the chipped stone tools found in the gravel pits of the Somme valley (long predating any estimate for the biblical Creation as narrated in the Book of Genesis) cleared a space of time in which the process of becoming human could take place. The latter, in outlining the central process of development by which living things are related, carried implications for the emergence of humankind which were later spelled out explicitly in Darwin's Descent of Man (1871). Since that time we have learned a great deal about the fossil ancestors which preceded the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens and, recently, DNA studies have allowed quite detailed inferences to be made about the structure of the family tree through which human diversity has been elaborated since the first human dispersals out of Africa some time between 85 000 and 55 000 years ago. Yet, despite the best efforts of anthropologists or of neuroscientists, or indeed of philosophers, we have still come to learn remarkably little about the development of the human mind, and perhaps not a great deal more about that of the brain. It is now nearly 30 years since Sir John Eccles, neuroscientist, sat down with Sir Karl Popper, philosopher of science, to debate The Self and Its Brain , and despite some theoretical clarifications, and the development of magnetic resonance imaging, allowing the study of which parts of the brain are active during the performance of various …